SCSI or ATAPI Slot Load DVD-Rom Drives

Vince604Mar 23, 2002, 9:44 PM

I'm on the pioneer site right now and see two slot load drives. One is the DVD-106s and the other DVD-305s. The dvd-106s is 16x ATAPI and the other is 10x SCSI. Does it matter if it's scsi or not? And anyone know which company has the best dvd-rom drives? Also looking for quiet ones too! Thx

well if you get that scsi you wont be able to connect it up to your IDE ports thats for sure.you will have to get a PCI scsi card and cable.

the advantages though are that u can then run many devices off that card, and the CPU utilisation when using the dvd drive is alot lower (note: for general reading, not dvd playing. dvd playing will still need to use the cpu)

generally pioneer or liteon are most talked about... they seem to be by far the most popular brands.

i have a pioneer 106S and i like it very much.a tad noisy perhaps on full spin, but that doesnt happen too often and its alot better than my old sony 52x cdrom.

also, a 10x dvd is bound to be quieter than a 16x as it spins slower!

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Thanks! Well I have a scsi card but not worrying bout ports or anything. With 1024mb RDRAM I don't think it will be able to really kill the CPU utilisation... Yeah I know Pionner and liteon are one of the best right now. I'm just wondering which one would have a better performance and run quieter.. Thanks So 10x DVD will be quieter for sure?...

definately... the speed of the disk determines the ultimate noise output, although the quality and balance of the drive can help (or hinder) alot.many modern drives also come with accoustic balancing, and of course this varies between brands and models.

yoru bet bet is to have a hunt around for dvd reviews that include accoustic ratings.

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that used to be the case yes,but now CPU's ahve become more powerful, so the cpu usage has fallen to levels low enough it really doesnt matter.we also have DMA and ata33/66/100/133 now too, further increasing transfer efficiency...

so unless your system is mega busy doing other things then using an ata 16x dvd will spank a scsi 10x in speed.

thats why you dont find many scsi cd drives anymore.once upon a time ata & atapi was slow and resource hogging. now it isnt, and in the past years the number of scsi cd-rom's, dvd's and cd-burners produced has fallen dramatically. there is little demand anymore.

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I see.. I know that SCSI isn't as common anymore but do they not have much faster transfer rates??? An 56x IDE CD-Rom have a transfer rate of 33.3 MB/sec (Ultra DMA mode) and a 40x SCSI CD-Rom has a 40MB/sec burst transfer rate. Can you tell me a bit about DMA?

The Typical bandwidth of a SCSI channel is ALOT larger than a ide drive.the best ide can do is 133mb/sec and the standard SCSI is 160 or even 320.

of course, if you are using just one drive there is no way you will even use a tenth of 160mb/sec

i.e. my Pioneer 106S can do dvd's at 16x and cd's at 40xso the max transfer rates we are looking at are21Mb/sec for dvd, 6Mb/sec for cd copying.

thus while my dvd drive is actually ATA66, it will still run just as fast set to ata33.

of course u will get better burst transfer rates, but that really doesnt have much of an impact at all.so the bandwidth advantages of scsi only exist for when u sport multiple drives.

and finally.DMA = Direct Memory Access.not sure exactly what happens, but i think with DMA enabled the drives and the IDE controller are allowed direct access to the memory independent of the Operating system... which makes the process alot faster and less resource hogging.

if u wanna see how much difference it makes, try disabling DMA on one of your drives!win2k has a habbit of doing that at really strange times to me... and Non-DMA mode (PIO) is baaaaaaaaad. slow, and makes my athlon chuggy.

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Ahhh. I see.. Thx LHGPooBaa~! I get it all now. Might as well as go with ide since I haven't seen any 320 hardrive and don't think I can use it at it's full potential anyways... not worth paying for scsi anyways.. Haha I don't think I'd ever wanna disable DMA then... Thanks again for all of the info!

yes sorry.. that's right. I thought a drive can sustain a transfer rate of 160mb/sec already? Seagate Ultra160 drives. But to think about what can I do with such fast drives? I know they cost a lot but your basically paying for higher transfer rate, bandwidth, and access time..

best drive around, the seagate 36mb 15k, can probably do around 60mb/sec or so... on the start of the media.so burst transfer rates basically mean diddly squat.some guy did a comparison of a maxtor drive at ata100 vs ata133 and found that the max performance difference was less than 5% in any single benchmark... about 1-2% overall.

so all ata133 or scsi160 means is that the maximum burst rate is 133mb/sec or 160.the real thing that determines sustained transfer rate is the drive rotational speed, platter density and to a lesser extent drive software optimisations and cache.

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Are you sure??...hmm I see... guess ATA100 would be a lot better value then.. alright so burst transfer rate is the highest it would ever reach to data transfer but not the average?...

anyways I got a question.. my old computer which is an AMD Athlon 1.3GHz cpu core has a tiny piece chipped off... On the core where it says AMD Athlon on the top left the M in AMD is chipped cutting the top of the M off.. Not sure how it really happened but guessing something tiny got on it and it burned and melted a little...would this totally destroy my cpu and mobo? or just the cpu?...anyways if you don't know it's okay... just asking..Thanks for the info!

oh yes...i suggest u head over to www.storagereview.com and have a look at some comprehensive benchmarks.

sustained transefer rates, unless in a raid configuration, are WELL below that of the burst speed.

tough luck on your core...coulda been a bit of grit or something... more likely it was too much writting and wobbling when putting on the heatsink (poor heatsink design can exacerbate the problem too)

depending on how bad the chip is it might work or not.

best thing to do is to carefully put a HS back on it and boot it up.worst case is it just wont boot.it it DOES work, keep an eye out for excessivly high temps and lockups... if these happen then its pretty much dead too.

well right now I don't think I would go into raid. 15k rpm hardrives aren't worth paying for and also have to buy the SCSI card.

well everything does bootup sorta... Here's what this whole thing leads to. I format my computer with winxp pro. (burned but worked perfectly fine for 5 other comps)(also used to work perfectly fine on the athlon 1.3) But had a virus and had to format..When finish formatting and copying system files it restarts. Then it starts up winxp pro. and the blue screen appears and flickers and begins the setup. But however it doesn't flicker and it just stops from there. There's where my problem is. It doesn't start the setup. And I'm guessing it's either the CPU or mobo... so not sure.. EVERY other cpu hardware I switched around already just not the cpu or mobo. So I'm guessing it's either one...

Anyways thanks for the site. I think I'm going to get the Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB since there's also an 8mb cache. But going to look into other drives.Thanks again!

yeah guessing it is too... oh wells I didn't really like that cpu anyways.

using a coolermaster cooler... Piece a junk to me.. Well on the new intel cpu I'm gonna get will probably be a swiftech... heard they are pretty good but just loud. so I'll probably change the fan..

yeah it's because of the 8mb cache feature..... but I wouldn't mind the cost.. I mean it's 4 times more cache then regular drives.. yeah I looked at the D740X but not really to my standards.. What I'm really trying to look for is hardware that is more than enough for yourself and not have to go out and replace with something even knewer when it already meets your standards..

Haha what bout CPU chips? Like Intel and AMD.. they have OEM! You know what's the best ide cd-rom drive you can get that can read burned media?... Kenwood 72x would've been perfect cept the DON'T read burned media..

well if your looking for supreme performance... maybe u should consider scsi, cauz a 10k rpm drive will even beat the 1200JB with 8mb.or consider doing a Raid 0 with two 120JB's for twice the performance.

as for cd drives... *shrug*may as well just get a combo dvd/cd drive and be done with it... they are all much of a muchness. best u will get i think is a 56x cd-rom drive... but they sound like jet engines cauz they have to spin so fast...

not exactly looking for supreme performance just enough for my needs.... well thinking bout scsi... I wouldn't mind getting scsi if the prices are lower and Ultra320 hardrives are out and became really cheap.........If I ever wanted to put more than 2 hardrives in my system I would have to get a IDE controller card right? If so you know which company that has the best ones? Since IDE is already pretty cheap.Raid 0? I'm new at Raid and I don't quite get it... it's like putting multiple hardrives in an array or somethhing like that right?.. and would I need hardware to do this?

oh I might get a combo... but the price is like almost double...is there any difference to the 106s and 116?... It's newer that 106s but I don't see a difference but the 106s is slot load which I like.

but I also wouldn't use my dvd-rom feature though.. I have a old dvd/cd combo and I never put a dvd in it yet!.. because I have a seperate dvd player for my tv already so why would I want to use it.... That's why I'm thinking of Cd-rom........ like when will you ever use your dvd-rom?? Unless your computer is connected to your tv or you have a huge monitor or lcd or plasma display.. or you're ripping dvds for people get off of you..

Pabst fan? or you mean Papst fan??was it a 80mm case fan and you just swapped the fans??Does it fit well? I mean it's the screw that's just a little longer right?

Trying to figure out a way to swap fans because I want it to be quiet... but by having a quieter fan the CFM is probably a lot lower.. doesn't that cause your cpu temp to go up a little more? So then I looked at www.amuzuma.com. It's a universal fan adapter for any heatsink I guess and I guess I'm going to mount a 92mm fan since it will have a higher CFM and lower dbA...Well does it really matter how much CFM the fan puts out anyways?... Not really wanting to pay 15 dollars for a piece of plastic...

Anything you choose to put on SCSI will help reduce the strain on your crappy IDE controller (all IDE controllers are crappy). Say you want to burn to an IDE burner from the DVD drive-well, you're less likely to get stalls with the newer BURN-PROOF drives, so you get faster burns. And drives without that protection will get fewer buffer under-runs.

Probably not much difference on single drives, but if you really had a high end system you would want RAID, and SCSI RAID is far superior to IDE RAID because the SCSI card has it's own processor, and because SCSI doesn't have to stop accessing one drive to start accessing the other as IDE does.

I would only do SCSI RAID if you are wealthy! Ultra 160 already exceeds the 133MB/s bandwidth of the PCI bus, the only way to benefit from Ultra320 is to have 64-bit or 66MHz PCI bus connections as found in some server boards. Also, and old dual channel Ultra80 card gets the same performance from using two channels that Ultra 160 gets from one channel, and could save you a bunch of money. I'll sell you a nice Ultra80 3 channel board that supports 45 hard drives, with 64MB cache, for $100.

argh so SCSI prices won't drop much eh... Guess I might as well as stick to IDE.

Yes I understand that Ultra 160 exceeds the 133mb/s bandwidth and I took a look at some server boards. But seems to me is that server boards with dual processors are quite expensive and are NOT very attractive. I mean you have to basically have all the special software which costs TONS of MONEY to actually get some actual performance off a server board. The most you can do on the server is probably multi-tasking if you don't have the software designed for dual processing.. but even now there are already P4's that can perform the same operations as a dual at the same speed if the dual is using regular software... So that's why I decided getting a normal motherboard instead of a server.

Sorry Crashman not really interested in that but it's a good price. Well I'm not wealthy and I'm not poor for all I can say... just average... really wanting the P4T533 from Asus.. And I don't need the very best but I just want something that will last.

Sorry to join in so late. Pooba-dude has been giving you good advice. On any single drive it matters very little if you have SCSI or IDE now that IDE has DMA.

If we are talking Hard Drives then you can usually buy faster SCSI drives then IDE but they cost a ton and spin very fast which could shorten lifespan. SCSI is the bomb for HDs but is generally not worth it.

DVD players are completely different. No DVD player even comes close to stressing the limit of modern IDE interfaces. SCSI DVD players are usually one generation <b>behind</b> IDE DVD players and are SLOWER. There is no good reason to get a SCSI DVD player in a home system. In the old days with slower CPUs and before DMA, IDE slowed a system down a bunch. With DMA IDE is perfectly fine for a home system and modern IDE controllers do not generate a significant CPU load. I know what I'm talking about because I have both SCSI and IDE systems myself.

You may already have it figured out but drives are generally sold based on the maximum speed that their electronics can go 33/66/100/160/320/whatever but all drives are mechanical and if you dig you will find the maximum transfer speed of the mechanical part of the drive. The electronics are zooming along but most of the time they are just waiting for the mechanical parts of the drive to feed them info. This is very similar to the way a CPU works. CPUs zoom along at 10 times the speed of main memory and the only thing that can keep up is the cache. If you get cache misses the CPU will be waiting doing nothing until memory can feed the CPU.

If cost were no object I would prefer SCSI hard drives (single or raid) and IDE dvd players. SCSI is better then IDE but in the case of dvds they develp the IDE drives first and scsi second as a after thought. As a result even though the SCSI part of the drive is better the mechanical part is one generation behind (10x instead of 16x). Hard drives are not done this way. High dollar server hds are developed first with SCSI I presume because SCSI is used by "professionals" on a company budget who can afford SCSI. If you need both speed and fault tolerance you can't beat a hot swap SCSI array.

"But don't SCSI have the controller cards which is suppose to help utilize less on your computer?.. "Yes and in the old days it made a huge difference because your cpu was slower so it had less to give and before DMA IDE was very inferior. Now it does not matter near as much because DMA causes IDE to also lessen the load on the cpu and also cpus are much faster so they do not use much of their time dealing with the hd.

"But are you sure kb/s?? Isn't it mb/s?"

B = Byte = 8 bitsb = bitM = Megam = mili

kB is incorrect and so is mb it is actually MB :-) I got the kB from an error on Tom's chart.

"Yeah I figure that their write and read speeds are only at certain points.. "If you follow the link in my last post you will see charts that cover speed over the entire survace of the drive.

I see. Well even if you have a DVD player at 16x it only plays at 1x or 2x I thought?.. Unless you're ripping or copying em...hehe...

Okay if I compared them without being in a raid setup will there still be big performance difference? An 15,000rpm Ultra160 SCSI HD compared to a 7200rpm 8mb IDE HD... Without the raid setups and only using it on it's own are there still great performance differences??

Ah thx for the terms!

Well would you happen to know any sites that will give you info on ATA, IDE, and SCSI? not just comparison but generally info. based on how it works?...

Ah so having a new computer wouldn't have to big a load on the cpu anyways then..

opps! MB/s I mean..Yeah I looked at the page and the problem is that the performance never stays at a constant level which sucks.. but guessing I'll just go with IDE since there still a lot cheaper...maybe because I'm wanting the WD1200JB so bad..Anyways thanx for the info!

I do not know for sure but I think you can use diffrent hd's but the slower one will be the limiting factor for speed and the smaller one will limit size. <b>Warning</b> setting up raid for speed increases the chance of data failure. Also even though I do not think it is required it is still recomended that the 2 (or 3 or 4) drives be the same.

Alright then.Well I have two old 40gig maxtor ide hardrives so I guesss I'll try it..But I'll still have to get an IDE controller at the same time right?... if I do then I just might wait for the Asus p4t533 since it will have on board ATA133 Raid 0/1.

Okay lets say I get speed increases from the hd's.. what will I be able to use them for with that kind of speed?

More SCSI vs IDE info...if you tootle over to <A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com</A> they have a recent article reviewing a 7200rpm SCSI drive... kinda for legacy devices mostly.

but the interesting thing about the review was the direct SCSI 7200rpm drive to ATA 7200rpm drive. the drives were basically the same, same cache, spin speed, very similar data densities.

the conclusion was that ATA drives are well able to keep up and often beat that particular drive (especially the 8mb western digitals)

the real benefits of SCSI are felt when:

A. you use a 10k or 15k rpm scsi drive (course IDE is limited to 7200rpm)

"But I'll still have to get an IDE controller at the same time right?... "

For hardware raid you will need a hardware raid card like the promise. Most MB have basic 4 device IDE "controller"s on board stock. You could go software raid if your MB has a IDE controler. You wouldn't need to buy anything for software raid.

"what will I be able to use them for with that kind of speed?"

Anything you want. The biggest speed increase would be from moving large files. Games will hesitate less or not at all between loads. If you do video editing in you will notice a big difference.

Alright then thanks. Okay I know Promise sells good IDE controllers but I'm probably going to do a Raid 1 + 0, which is a combination of Raid 1 and 0. Most likeley going to use only 2 hardrives but I know for a fact that next month or two a Mobo will come out with a RAID controller. If I buy a Raid controller would I get any special benefits from it than a onboard Raid feature on a mobo?

So are you saying it will utilize less of my cpu?.. Okay if I do file transfer on a LAN wouldn't all the systems need be set in a RAID configuration in order for the speed to come in handy?